From gentle Jesus to macho Messiah

Predictions of the Second Coming of Jesus as a vengeful warrior are gaining momentum in a post-September 11, evangelical America, writes David D. Kirkpatrick.

Writers and artists have been imagining the Second Coming of Jesus for almost 2000 years, but few have portrayed him wreaking more carnage on the unbelieving world than Tim LaHaye and Jerry B.Jenkins.

In their new apocalyptic novel, Glorious Appearing, based on LaHaye's interpretation of biblical prophecies about the Second Coming, their Jesus appears from the clouds on a white horse with a "conviction like a flame of fire" in his eyes. With all the gruesome detail of a Hollywood horror movie, Jesus eviscerates the flesh of millions of unbelievers merely by speaking.

"Men and women, soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood," LaHaye and Jenkins write. "It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin." The authors add: "Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated."

LaHaye and Jenkins did not invent fire and brimstone. But some scholars who study religion say that the phenomenal popularity of their Left Behind series of apocalyptic thrillers - now the best-selling adult novels in the United States - are part of a shift in American culture's image of Jesus. The gentle, pacifist Jesus of the Crucifixion is sharing the spotlight with a more muscular, warrior-like Jesus of the Second Coming, the Lamb making way for the Lion.

Scholars who study religion in American culture say the trend partly reflects the growing clout of evangelical Christians and the relative decline of the liberal mainline Protestant denominations over the past 30 years. The image of a fearsome Jesus who will turn the tables on the unbelieving earthly authorities corresponds to a widespread sense among many conservative Christians that their values are under assault in a culture war with the secular society around them.

The shift coincides with a surging interest in biblical prophecies of the Apocalypse around the turn of the millennium, the terrorist attacks of September11 and the two wars with Iraq. And the warlike image of Jesus also fits with President George Bush's discussions of a godly purpose behind US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are signs of the same shift in Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, which dealt almost exclusively with the submissive Jesus of the Crucifixion. "When you see him stand up at the end of the movie, he reminds you of Schwarzenegger," says Stephen Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University and author of American Jesus: how the Son of God became a national icon. , "I think that movie shows more of a macho Jesus, who, in this case, is brutalised instead of brutalising."

He adds: "I definitely think the pendulum is swinging towards a darker, more martial, macho concept of the Messiah."

Some worry that the turn towards a more warlike Jesus reflects a dangerous tendency to see earthly conflicts in cosmic terms. "I think a lot of people are looking at contemporary conflict around the world and seeing it as a kind of religious war," says Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton. "And there is no kind of conflict that becomes more intractable than when people are convinced that they alone have access to God's truth and the other side are the people of Satan."

But Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, calls the warrior Jesus of the Left Behind novels a healthy corrective, reminding people that Jesus is judgemental as well as merciful. "The fear of God is a worthy emotion," he says.

He argues that the wrathful Jesus in the book series is an antidote to what he calls "the effeminate Jesus" that has sometimes prevailed in the culture. "In our stained-glass windows and our popular culture, Jesus is a kind of marshmallowy, Santa Claus Jesus, which is not at all in keeping with the Gospels," he says.

The fight for a manly Jesus has been long-running. At the beginning of the 20th century, some Christian critics railed against what they called "bearded lady" portraits of Jesus in the Victorian era. But the battle over the manliness of Jesus had settled down by the middle of the 20th century, when the relatively liberal, mainline Protestant denominations were at their height.

Few liberal Protestants believed in a literal Hell or talked much about the Second Coming. Their masculine but soft-spoken image of Jesus was exemplified by the once-ubiquitous portrait Head of Christ, made by Warner Sallman in 1941, which depicted a handsome man looking serenely upward. "It is the classic MrRogers Jesus picture," Prothero says.

But a less visible subculture of more evangelical Protestants held on to a far sterner, more bellicose image of Jesus that centred on the Apocalypse. Like LaHaye, they maintained a darker "pre-millennialist" view that the Bible predicts a period of turmoil before Jesus returns in a final apocalyptic battle to overthrow the Antichrist.

Bible scholars holding this view have often sought to apply biblical prophecy to current events, frequently taking the creation of the state of Israel as a welcome sign that history is nearing a close. LaHaye's Left Behind series starts when all the born-again are summoned to heaven in the Rapture.

Then the Antichrist uses the United Nations to create a single world government, world currency and world religion - all signposts on the road to Armageddon, in LaHaye's view. The Antichrist establishes his global capital at the biblical Babylon, in today's Iraq.

The overarching themes in such biblical interpretation also bear a strong resemblance to contemporary talk of a culture war pitting secular liberals against conservative Christians, says Timothy Weber, president of Memphis Theological Seminary. "The culture war fits into the pre-millennialists' expectation of the end of history - the decline of civilisation, the breakdown of morality, a general breakdown of order," he said. "The warrior Jesus returns to set everything right again."

Until about 30 years ago, evangelical Christians who leaned towards such views tended to shun engagement with politics or the larger culture as a little bit dirty and a little bit pointless, says John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron who studies religion. But that changed around the 1970s, when many conservative Christians began to feel that their traditional values had come under attack from the secular culture around them. When conservative Christians began to join the culture war, LaHaye was on the frontlines, joining Jerry Falwell in founding the Moral Majority.

Not all evangelical Protestants agree with LaHaye, but they are much more likely than other groups to sympathise with him. "The groups that had those views are much more visible than they used to be," Green says. "They are more politically active than they were in the past."

Even in the Roman Catholic Church, which does not share LaHaye's interpretation of the Second Coming, a growing number of conservatives, including Mel Gibson, identify with conservative Protestants, Green says.

They have also helped put allies in the White House. Ronald Reagan occasionally alluded to biblical prophecies of a final battle at Armageddon, stirring fears among liberal Christians that he envisioned a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union.

Bush, a born-again Methodist, has not talked publicly about Armageddon, but he has been unusually outspoken about the role of his faith in his life and his foreign policy, suggesting the United States is doing God's work by spreading freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For his part, Jenkins, co-author of Glorious Appearing, acknowledges that the "tough love" Jesus might not please everyone. "Some people might say, 'We like thinking that Jesus is the man who spoke in paradoxes and beatitudes', and they might not want to find out that he is also the one who is going to judge at the end of the world," he says, adding: "But, of course, that is the way it is in the Bible."

- New York Times

The Left Behind series, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, (Tyndale House, $12.95 each) and American Jesus, by Stephen Prothero, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $47.95) are available at Readings bookstore in Carlton.